Sierra Murphy

“When your focus is on how you feel about things in the world then the things of the world slip from view, your little boat of learning things for what they are are swamped by the swells of how you feel about them. With hard work and with learning, the things of the world are still somehow out there, waiting for you to know about them, no matter how you feel. They survive how you feel about them and they are there before and after the storms of your feelings roar through and abate. Feelings aren't much of a compass to go by.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Not success. Not growth. Not happiness. The cradle of your love of life … is death.”
― Stephen Jenkinson

“It's all over, it's all over,' I muttered to myself. My grief resembled that of a fainthearted student who has failed an examination: I made a mistake! I made a mistake! Simply because I didn't solve that X, everything was wrong. If only I'd solved that X at the beginning, everything would have been all right. If only I had used deductive methods like everyone else to solve the mathematics of life. To be half-clever was the worst thing I could have done. I alone depended upon the inductive method, and for the simple reason I failed.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask